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Saturday, July 31, 2010

Bonnitta Roy - AQAL 2210: A Tentative Cartology of the Future; Or How do We Get from AQAL to A-perspectival? #itc2010

I'm looking forward to this talk - very interesting concept, and a very important topic. This is first up on my schedule today.

Bonnitta Roy, Associate Editor, Integral-Review: AQAL 2210: A Tentative Cartology of the Future; Or How do We Get from AQAL to A-perspectival?

As early as 1946 Gebser predicted that Integral consciousness would render all the previous structures of cognition transparent. Today we have the AQAL map which identifies eight native perspectives. Can “super integrative” perspectives that go beyond these emerge in the future? Gebser also predicted that the new consciousness would go beyond perspectival thinking, altogether, into the realm of the A-perspectival, which entails space and time freedom, transparency, spirituality, and dynamics of the whole. So How do We Get from AQAL to A-perspectival—from perspectives delimitated across boundaries, to a realm of unbounded wholeness?

Bonnitta Roy was awarded the ITC 2008 honorary achievement award for integral theory. She is a Graduate Institute guest faculty for the master’s class in Conscious Evolution and is a founder of Alderlore—a living experiment to teach insight and energy awareness. She is currently developing http://integralreviewofbooks.com/

Here is the rest of her abstract, from the paper:

Writing in No Boundary, Wilber tells us:

The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.

Integral theory is tricky. In many respects, it is a liberation theory – whether it addresses personal, spiritual or social concerns. At its best, integral theory enables us to dis-embed from limited perspectival frameworks, and open up into more integrated views. However, at its worst, integral theory is absorbed as a metaphysical reality, as a fixed and static limitation on how we perceive, what we can perceive, and how reality arises. When Wilber writes that AQAL is a map of the prison, the integral community should immediately understand that there is no prison except for the map. A-perspectivity is the unconditioned situation of living/being without the map. If we can learn to operate from that unconditioned place, then we can create new maps through which new worlds might arise with greater degrees of freedom and open-up our choice field. If we operate from that unconditioned place we will avoid the mistakes of misplaced concreteness that weld ideas into the bars and barriers of our self-imposed prisons. If we operate from that unconditioned place we will have transmuted the prisons of our selves into the playgrounds of spirit. We will, in other words, enter into the ever-present process of enacting our future.

[Post-presentation.] WOW! Her presentation blew my little brain - I wish more people had been here to hear her speak - please go read her paper. If you thought AQAL's 8 zones/perspectives, imagine 20 zones and perspectives, and see the lists below.

She presented so clearly on such a complex topic. This needs to sit with me before I think I can even begin to write about it. Here is one more section from the introduction of her paper:

Although each section describes a different kind of shift, there are key elements that weave throughout, which formulate the overriding prescriptions:

1 . The shift from structural thinking to generative process thinking.2 . Generative processes do not exist in space and time rather, processes generate spatial and temporal frameworks3 . The ontological shift from linear time-based befores and afters to onto-genetically generated posterior events from anterior sources.4 . The de-objectification of phenomena5 . The a-local subject which is simultaneously no-where and everywhere.6 . The resolution of opposites. Polar opposites are unified as dynamic fields, and dualistic pairs are re-conceptualized into generative orders.7 . New ontology of wholes and parts toward entangled structures in generative orders.

These are key elements in an emergent future AQAL map. This paper is not of sufficient length to deal with them individually, but the careful reader will be able to identify them in each of the following three sections.

In a recent key note speech at Integral Spiritual Experience, Lama Surya Das quipped about the twofold path of Buddha-hood as “swooping while climbing.” In this paper, the path toward aperspectivity is threefold: climbing, diving, and swooping. Section I is the climbing session. It considers some recent work to be written from a methodological perspective that is more than cross-disciplinary, and may represent entirely new methodological approaches, which I call Super-integrative Methodologies. By looking at what these Super-methodologies might tackle in the future, four new hori-zones are hypothesized for a future AQAL map. Section I is the climbing session because here tremendous effort is involved where we are dealing with increasing degrees of complexity, meta-systematic thinking, and the need for new kinds of language. Section II is the “diving session” where the reader is asked to dive into an entirely new kind of thinking about ontological priors. Section II requires a paradigm shift from thinking in terms of dualistic pairs, toward conceptualizing prior wholes from which the dualistic pairs have “parsed themselves out.” This new kind of thinking I term “onto-logics” for reasons that will be explained later. Section III is the swooping section. It entails a shift from thinking, reasoning, and conceptualizing toward a kind of direct insight into the nature of being-becoming. Section III attempts to situate intuitions of phenomena such as co-dependent origins, spontaneous arisings, nonduality, and kosmocentricity with fundamental insight into openspace, and degrees of freedom, in other words, the view from which the aperspectival world flows.